RoomEditor enhancements

Greetings, prisoners!

This week in programming, we’ve made some progress on the room system and the ‘Room Editor’ tool to automate this entire process.

Last week we discussed the process of automating the basic elements of a scene—namely, camera positioning, applying shaders, and assigning zones.

This time, we’ve added an animation system that’s still in development. With this, we’ll be able to recreate some parts of the game that did contain animations (does anyone remember the flies in the kitchen?).

The animations currently run at 24 fps, though we’re considering using a lower frame rate (around 15) to enhance the feel of games from that era, since a very characteristic feature was precisely that “lack of frames” in the background animations.

I’ve attached a video of this animation system in action. As you can see, there are still a few things that need to be fine-tuned.

In terms of performance, the animations are created by extracting a region of pixels from the original image (the full render) and are saved in RGB24 files. This is giving us an in-game frame rate of about 1020 FPS, with all effects enabled.

This figure, however, will vary in the future, as we are not yet considering scenarios with more characters, more effects, and more resources in action. Nevertheless, it does allow us to verify that the future game La Prisión consumes as few resources as possible. In other words: that it runs on as many computers as possible.

The Room Editor tool has also received a major update, adding a dedicated tab for creating animations. Basically, by specifying a path, a rectangle, a speed, and an animation curve, Room Editor will automatically generate all the steps for us.

Unfortunately, the tool is not yet complete at this time, as we still need to debug some of its current features and implement some new ones.

We’ve also improved the transparency shader for 3D elements, adding the ability to use a mask, which allows us to create fences in the game that hide the geometry of the 3D elements behind them:

We’ll bring you more updates next week.

Greetings to all!
The new team at La Prisión.